The personal view on the IT world of Johan Louwers, specially focusing on Oracle technology, Linux and UNIX technology, programming languages and all kinds of nice and cool things happening in the IT world.

Sunday, December 29, 2013

Internet of things moving to interoperability

When we look at the internet and then primarily at the world wide web part of the internet where webpages are offered to users we see there is a good level of interoperability and standards. Webpages are offered primarily on HTML and HTML and HTTP, originally invented by Tim Berners-Lee, are adopted by the majority of services offered online. The protocols lower in the stack like TCP/IP are well defined and clear to everyone and are the foundation that enables communication. when the first steps where taken to create those protocols the number of people involved where not that big and making sure new ideas where adopted where somewhat less troublesome. At this moment more and more people do have access to the internet and do have (some) level of understanding about how to develop new solutions.

When we look at the internet of things we see that a lot of people, organisations and companies are developing solutions that are added to the concept of the internet of things. Most of those solutions do make use of some of the existing standards. for example, most make use of TCP/IP and a large part of them makes use of the HTTP protocol to communicate data. What is missing however is a set of documented standards on what will be communicated and how we can enable interoperability between devices from different vendors.

Qualcomm is trying to make an attempt to start such a standard. Qualcomm developed the alljoyn solution and has now joined the allseen alliance. By doing so they have given over the alljoyn code to the Linux foundation in the hope that this will help fuel the adoption of a unified protocol for the internet of things.

The allseen alliance is currently rapidly growing and is certifying devices that are compliant to the standards of the alliance. members include:LG, Sharp, Haier, Panasonic, Sears Brand Management Corporation, Silicon Image, Cisco, TP-LINK, Canary, doubleTwist, Fon, Harman, HTC, Lifx, Liteon, Sproutling and Wilocit